Ho-hum… Obama, the Great Capitulator Runs Again… Can We Have a real Progressive Challenge Him? Please…

04/05/2011 — Suzan

So Yesterday Obama kicked off his 2012 election campaign with an ad that is so apathetic it is almost as though he has already capitulated as he usually does.

I voted for him. He wasn’t my choice. I would have preferred someone tougher and stronger like Hillary but too many pod people, the children of “i” and Nintendo liked him because he was smooth and slick.

We used to say you can’t trust anyone over thirty. I’ve come to think you can’t trust anyone who came of age since Reagan. Especially not someone who thought Reagan was essential because he corrected the excesses of freedom and exuberance of the 1960s and 70s.

Now I know Obama’s true believers will tell me he has done all these wonderful things but to me he is just another neo-con/neo-lib puppet of Wall Street.

He sure as hell has done a shitty job of representing my interests.

I’m tired of voting for the lesser of two evils. I’m almost cynical enough to buy the heightening the contradictions argument that would cause me to say fuck it and stay home then join the riots in the street.

Maybe if the Tea Baggers and Kochsuckers won we would have a revolution. They come to power, end Social Security and Medicare in a country that is armed to the teeth. Come the revolution and you might just see kamikaze grannies on electric scooters with AK47s and AR15s. Lesbians with grenades and Molotovs. Real “Ticked off (Don’t call me a tranny) TS/TG People with Knives”.

Workers with torches and pitchforks, the heads of Wall Street thieves on the ends of pikes.

But, I learned a bitter lesson in 1968 and maybe revolution is really only a fantasy but fuck I sure would like some one who cared more about the people of Main Street than the people of Wall Street.

Barack Obama 2012 Campaign Launch Video – “It Begins With Us”

The Nowhere Man

So, yeah, Obama is in. The President of the United States officially threw his hat into the 2012 election ring on Monday morning, and the nation reacted with a resounding, “Oh.”

What a mess.

It wasn’t even two and a half years ago. Can you believe it? Two and a half years ago, there was a detonation of optimism that echoed across the country once the returns were in on that November night. People took to the streets here in Boston, literally banging pots and pans together as they danced and shouted in celebration. The scene was repeated in city after city and town after town, and even the “mainstream” media gushed from election night to Inauguration Day about the spectacular moment in American history we were all witnessing together.

Hindsight, however, tells us today that much of that optimism was wildly misplaced. The long shadow of George W. Bush still hung low and dark over the land, as it does even now. That was part of it, of course, part of the sense of expiation and purgation so many felt once the deal went down; on that November night, the national nightmare of Mr. Bush’s presidency was writing its final pages, and then came January, and he was gone. Despite all the failures and disappointments that have since come, those were two very good days.

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He and his fellow Democrats all but folded on health care, leaving us with less than half a loaf. He backtracked on Guantanamo, and doubled down on Afghanistan. He promised to erase Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy, and broke his oath shamelessly, to his party’s great lament in 2010. Wall Street stands unmolested at the center of his counsel, while Main Street withers on the vine. He is flipping missiles into Libya while flipping off the American people by racing to “compromise” with brigands and thieves on the matter of how many billions to cut. He has, to be sure, had his share of victories, but in so many critical ways, he has been the Nowhere Man, the absence of what was so seemingly present when he was elevated to his current station.

What galls the most, what infuriates and confounds, is the brazen clarity of the situation at hand. Mr. Obama has not been losing policy arguments to reasonable people. He has been losing policy arguments to people who are, in many instances, absolutely and unabashedly barking mad. He is losing policy arguments to people who sought elected office in government in order to denude and destroy that very government. Listen to them talk and the matter is plain: they got the job to destroy the job, and are so blinded by the fervor of their political catechism that they cannot be reasoned with under any circumstances. They are destroyers and usurpers, but Mr. Obama has time and again bared his neck to them, and we have all suffered with their sundry victories, and his sundry defeats.

Fool Us Twice?

Usually I don’t care about political horseraces. Yet I am fascinated by Obama’s reelection bid. Never mind what’s good for the country. I’m dying to hear him make his case for another four years.

I don’t pretend to be able to predict the future. But I have a rich imagination—and I still can’t begin to guess how the president can convince a majority of voters to choose him over the Republican nominee whether he be Mitt Romney or she be Michele Bachmann.

Obama is good with words. But what can he possibly say for himself after this first fiddling-while-Rome-burns term?

The president only has one major accomplishment to his credit: healthcare reform. However—assuming Republicans don’t repeal it—it doesn’t go into effect until 2014. Which, from Obama’s standpoint, actually helps him. After people find out how it transforms the First World’s worst healthcare system into something even crappier and more expensive, they’ll be burning him in effigy.

“Socialized” (if only!) healthcare has driven away the Reagan Democrat swing voters who formed half of Obama’s margin of victory in 2008. Unless the GOP nominates some total loon (hi Michele) or past-due retread (what up Newt) these ideological reeds in the wind will blow Republican.

The other major component of the Obama coalition, young and reenergized older liberals, see ObamaCare as a right-wing sellout to corporations. Nothing less than single-payer would have satisfied them. On other issues it seems that Obama has missed few opportunities to alienate the Democrats’ liberal base.

“The combination of Afghanistan and Libya could bring a bitter end to the romance between Democratic liberals and Obama,” Steve Chapman writes in Reason magazine. “Many of them were already disappointed with him for extending the Bush tax cuts, bailing out Wall Street, omitting a public option from the healthcare overhaul, offering to freeze domestic discretionary spending, and generally declining to go after Republicans hammer and tong.”

Chapman predicts a strong primary challenge to Obama’s left flank—someone like Russ Feingold.